Category / Press

The Heart Gallery Podcast, Rebeka Ryvola de Kremer talks to artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee. Joyce works with video, digital photography, and interactive installation that combine social practice with institutional critique. Curious about how the act of seeing is transformed by technology, her artwork examines how mass media and visual culture shape notions of truth and understanding of the “other.”

At the Hirshhorn Museum, an ominously beautiful cloud of hundreds of plastic bottles hangs from the ceiling. Further north, at the Kreeger Museum, an aluminum photo collage reflects tiny slivers of the viewers’ faces among images of deep-sea corals. These works intend to connect viewers with environmental issues that often feel far-off. 

Three different District art museums—the Hirshhorn, the Kreeger and the Freer Gallery of Art—currently have exhibitions or events focused on environmental justice and the climate crisis, bringing environmental issues to life in a way that science and data rarely can.

The first puzzle of the Kreeger Museum’s “Perplexity” is “Where is it?” Pieces by seven former Hamiltonian Artworks fellows are scattered through galleries filled primarily with items from the permanent collection — and even installed in a fireplace, which is where Amy Boone-McCreesh’s “Good Luck Charms” hangs. The goal is to juxtapose the new works with the Kreeger’s mostly 20th-century holdings.

‘Together’ is a word which carries unusually poignant resonances right now in the midst of a global pandemic. The fact that churches worldwide forewent assembling for celebrations of Pentecost—that day of great gathering together of God’s Spirit and the nations—serves as a case-in-point for our situation.

Home Alone Together: We are told that home is where the heart is, but also that, while we can travel the world in search of what we need, we must return home in order to find it. Home has been described as the centre and circumference, the start and finish, of most of our lives. That may be particularly so at this time, in both its constraining and revelatory senses. Home can be a place of abuse which it is imperative to leave but may also be a shelter from storms and the place where our most important work is done.

In the exhibition REDIRECT, the inherent risks of our social media landscape—exposure, error, loss—are reflected through installations by seven artists who approach contemporary technology both deliberately and cautiously.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a network of artist-run spaces in several U.S. cities, aims “to collectively bring people together, expand connections and build community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects and curatorial opportunities.” Curated by Suzanne Dittenber, the Greenville, S.C., chapter’s REDIRECT show at Revolve’s RAMP Gallery furthers that goal with work that “critically or philosophically engages with technology” and finds each artist “examining the web, social media, mobile devices or other contemporary technology with a calculated sense of intentionality or caution.”

I was interviewed by James Coomarasamy of BBC Sounds

I was interviewed by China Unscripted in #42 Hacking China’s Censorship | FIREWALL Cafe (podcast).

HKFP speaks to artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee about her interactive art project “FIREWALL.”